THe HP has a 2" bigger screen. The Mac has half the memory, a smaller non SSD style hybrid drive with 250gb less storage, it has no second drive bay. The graphicscards are the same but it has 512mb while the HP has 2gig video ram, it only has 1 battery (the small 5cell hp does 5.75 hours, the big 9 cell does at least 7 hours and are user replaceable which means I have 13hours of battery life combined. The HP has beats audio, and the dual hard drive bay, it has a bluray player that will fill up that 1080p monitor and burn blueray disks if you rip or need storage. All this for 1259.99 dollars at the sale price(- $200)

Another way of saying it is...

The HP is 50% heavier with a terrible quality screen with awful viewing angles, dreadful colours, pixilated text and fewer options to resize text without losing quality. The HP although it is based around the same chipset it has a slower graphics card than Apple's. The HP has slow wi-fi, a terribly keyboard and trackpad, doesn't have thunderbolt and can only drive one external screen while the Apple can drive three (four in total) external monitors of any orientation. The HP has a slow mechanical HDD compared to Apple's SSD. The HP comes installed with lots of useless bloatware and may take a dew days of configuration and experimentation to get working nicely with third party applications and hardware. Unless you go open source the HP is tied into the windows eco-system, where the Apple can seamlessly run OSX and windows side by side.

I could go on...

You see it's possible to put any spin on a product. At the end of the day the HP is a lot cheaper than a rMBP but you get less for your money in some respects and 'a bit more' in others. I don't go around berating people for not buying Apple gear, but you do get lots of dim-witted fools mouthing off about how people who buy anything from Apple are swayed only my marketing, and refuse to accept that while Apple gear isn't cheap it's a quality product.

I'm sure your HP laptop will do you fine. I wish you well with it and it sounds like a flexible machine that will serve you well for many a years. But it's a cheap laptop and compromises have to made. Maybe you're okay with those and that's fine.

Others though have said this about the machine (These are the subject line of reviews taken directly from HPs website).

“I'm very disappointed”“This product is terrible”“Please do not buy!”“Poor build quailty/performance”“4 crash dumps in 1 week”“Quality Control?”“Bad purchase”“sub-standard wireless adapter”“Great except for wireless performance”“Computer is buggy”“Wanted to love this laptop but...”“Problems with touchpad”“Great product but poor hardware”“Dislike the monitor”

You think I am going to pay for an overpriced apple.. No

There is a $2199 Macbook pro model that is nearly double the price but you get a step up processer and still the video card has only 1gb, the drive is 5400rpm, You can upgrade the HP to the same processor for $175 more.

Apple is still nearly double the price for a lot less of computer and features. It is well designed and my be more durable than the HP but the HP has 2 year warranty, the mac has 1. As I said, smart people will go to both websites and figure it out. Apple fanbois will still try to justify their purchase and their fanboi brand.